Transcript

Transforming Water of Death to Life and Prosperity | Arup Sengupta | TEDxLehighU

good afternoon everybody I'm a chemical and environmental engineer by training in the last 35 years or so in my profession my research has evolved around water water which is often referred to as life but at the same time it can also be the cause of death this is a gentleman who doesn't need an interaction he's known to everybody at the same time when you look at this oh man or lady hardly anybody knows how these two people literally live in two different worlds and to make it even worse this woman makes less than $2 a day but still these two people have one amazing similarity that is in regard to drinking water both of them drink approximately two liters of saline water every day 69 percent of their body weight is due to water and at the same time the water of the drink that basically is very much in compliance with stipulations said by international organizations like World Health Organization so that's a huge similarity for two people who were seemingly so different what exactly is that woman doing and where is this particular place this is in a remote village bordering India and Bangladesh she is collecting her daily supply of drinking and cooking water from underground why underground because the water from lakes ponds or kennels which we call surface water they are often contaminated with the germs of typhoid cholera dysentery things like that on the contrary water from underground is naturally filtered so it is kind of microorganism free and that's why United Nations thank millions of this kind of cheap walls around the world this particular picture I took myself in February 1995 this is little over 23 years ago so during the next 15 minutes I'm going to give you a condensed version of what unfolded during this period of 23 years this is again almost the same but this is in the middle of Bangladesh after a little bit of flood and you can see water water everywhere but still this Lennie is basically collecting water from underground through that well for the same reason it was very common then something happened something which was not in the later of United Nations which was completely unforeseen there was tiny amount of arsenic got contaminated with groundwater due to natural soil leaching a key word is natural so a leaching arsenic is extremely toxic but at the same time it doesn't provide any color order and test that's why historically you know when human beings we wanted to get rid of our enemies kings queens or spouses other people arsenic was always the substance of choice here the hope it is not man-made this is all natural or mother nature and these are the pictures not very gruesome ones but taken primarily by me around different countries in the world thousands of people died and as a result of that this is a huge natural calamity so it appeared in the first page of New York Times New Times called it the greatest natural calamity of our time the punch world is natural it is not due to any Russian collusion not because of any sea ice cover activity it's all motherland nature all the way when there was a graduate student myself somebody came and give a lecture about water and the content has now changed and the point he was making is about twenty nine thousand people around the world die every day every day because of waterborne diseases and then in order to make the story more sensational what he said was that it is almost like 40 fully loaded 747s crashing every day just imagine 40 fully loaded 747 crashing every day and if that time comes you'd probably think the world is coming to an end but now then I realized as a huge disconnect you'll I am editing that because the people who died this twenty nine thousand people they have never been into 747 they do not even know I mean what died inside of 747 look like they mostly look like this this is in one of the villages where you work this guy was obviously or suffering from arsenic related cancer in the list he is caring this is the list of 28 people in a small village of 200 families for these 28 people apparently have died of arsenic related complication primarily cancer and the other thing is also true all these people make also less than $2 a day so this aeroplane is 7 for 7 and these people there is a huge bar between the two what happened after that the government NGOs and other people wanted to do something and the first thing they could do is they could identify this is a well in Cambodia and near the capital Phnom Penh they kind of market rate alerting people do not drink water from here because this water couldn't contains a lot of arsenic in it weight naturally they have to have them to drink water they need 2 liters of water every day they have to walk they have to find another water resource we are engineers belong to an academic institution our approach was more like interventions so that all of us can do we do something in the mouths of that well so that people can retain their old culture and still receive water they have drunk so this is basically a follow up of that this is near Bangladesh border this village girl she's doing exactly the things she was doing earlier the only difference is now the water goes through this column and gets collected in real time but in the process it becomes arsenic safe so basically we started with that did that in maybe hundred such villages but this women or the people there didn't really need to know the underlying science or chemistry so inside what was going on pretty much like this but the game the technology was brought down to a level where they could make use of it this is a part of a research paper published in environmental science and technology and then we ran into another problem the problem was after three or six months this filters get exhausted so they need to be replenished they need fresh supply of filters and in a remote place that's not easy there came another research idea can we build a material a filter material which we can reuse regenerate and go on for years so that once given to villagers what other people they basically keep on using it for years and then that started in 96 and then in 2003 this is the material we made called hybrid erection Nano sorban this is seven-year period now that's the tenacious journey and we had our Arica moment and we made only 2 grams and we obviously had a patent on the material there was two grams after seven years of work but between 2003 and 2008 II may be 200 million grams of materials have been commercially made and at least 2 million people around the world in six different countries including the United States they get their safe drinking water through use of this material the point here is from our perspective belonging to an Academy institution we start with science mr. Newton and then quite naturally proceed and then go keep try and eventually find out the lady and then we want both of the to get married and live happily ever after that is the ultimate of science because empathy compassion kindness these are all good virtues but they do not necessarily solve problem so it somehow you have to bring science and technology get married to all those good qualities in order to make a difference or in order to mitigate a kind of amount crisis like this drinking water one and then a lot of things happen quickly this is in Bangladesh in Winston planning people are collecting same thinking water in the morning twice a day this is in Cambodia and this is again near the same place and if you watch little carefully this lady she doesn't have the left hand which had to be amputated amputated because of arsenic related complication or malignancy and this plant essentially it has removed for over three years arsenic from 600 we call it parts per billion which is very high for arsenic to less than five many students NGOs Academy institutions from other countries they have all been part of this collaborative exercise this is Lee Blaney Lee High graduates a BS and a mystic the holder he is now the professor in his own right but then something even more exciting happened this is Michael German who was a Lee High graduate student received his PhD last year exciting character he wanted to take all this thing through a social enterprise he is standing there in a University of california-berkeley winning the first prize of $25,000 another person also joined the team this is Mina Chowdhury he also won several of such competitions Manoj Mike and myself we have one commonality we all wear Fulbright fellows in the Indian subcontinent but the key spark happened when we won which is called us I still in the army fund us Ice T stands for United States India Science and Technology endowment fund and they gave us two marching order one is in many countries including Africa and Asia including China say also fluoride problem and fluoride in drinking water may not be as kind of toxic but it leads to kind of which is called skeletal fluorosis and you can very quickly see the bones basically they basically they came it's time and it is a very common thing also in Kenya Ethiopia and other countries in Africa that was one and then there was another charter day of that was can we transform this is the crisis can we transform this crisis through technology into an economic opportunity into providing employment to other people does technology do that so what we got into was in a very kind of a concise form so this is your contaminated well which started making the material in India because that was the best location and it's a more democratic than other countries where the problem exists and then wait net so we took the material in still plans and then there are places like Bangladesh and then a many schools like this is a school where the children were kind of routinely drinking a fluoride contaminated water now the dream safe water and then obviously at the end the key thing was there is a financial model layer that means the people they may be poor maybe they are making less than $2 a day they make a tiny amount of tariffs for contribution but that kind of allow to sustain the process for a very long time and there are plenty of examples so this is a guy who makes its internal living by transporting arsenic or fluoride safe water to remote villages that's his sole source of income which is very significant this is the place where you can see this is an operator here who gets paid through the tariffs and this is the one who basically is responsible for transporting the safe water so this is like a employment circle being created this is an example of how in one location between 2005 in 2017 how the revenue increased from kind of little over five hundred dollars to over three thousand dollars because more people participated and the number basically grew from about 250 to 500 which means 500 families means like 2000 people they were participating over there so that is the kind of story but from my end there's always a take-home message you know I'm a professor a PhD I do research but we keep learning so one key learning kind of message was yes we need science and engineering to solve problem but to really do it happens in a linear way this is almost impossible you know whatever we think it's never going to happen Murphy's Law is the best law probably for that so what do we do we keep trying keep trying and then basically what happens is we are right there but in a very very convoluted part but that doesn't mean all the time when to west in the process obviously we have to have what you call a sense of humility learning from people who are at the bottom of the pyramid being kind of open and at the same time tenacity that my path may not be the right path but then I have to find out the other one so it is like a triangle with three post one is my technology coming from mr. Newton I need humility to work with others because this problem involves people who are basically at the bottom of the pyramid and obviously there has to be some kind of a resolute for solving the problem and only then we can go there and find out so ultimate our humanity and we can get them married and that's my 15 minute saga for the 23 year old story which unfolded at lehigh thank you [Applause]